A Critical Blog On the World of Pop Culture and Sports

Menu

Monthly Archives: March 2018

Don’t make these people your heroes: Count Dankula (centre) and Paul Joseph Watson of Infowars and God knows who the other guy is. Credit: twitter.com

One of the more prevalent stories making the rounds in Scotland certainly, but around the world, has been the arrest and charging of controversial Youtuber, ‘Count Dankula’. Free speech and comedy have had a bit of a tenuous relationship for centuries as comedians defend their jokes from a mixture of the prudish, and most recently, liberal progressives. I have had an interest in this intersection of comedy and free speech for at least eight years when I wrote critically of the South Park creators for playing around with depicting the Prophet Muhammad. As a self-identifying progressive as well as a more shakily self-identifying comedy writer, free speech and what is ‘acceptable’ has been a dichotomy which has shifted uneasily between a few positions regularly often depending on the latest convincing opinion I have heard. Luckily, I have come to something like a final position, in no small thanks to this latest controversy.

Shortly before Count Dankula made his unfortunate rise to relative prominence, Ricky Gervais released his latest stand up hour, Humanity, on Netflix which created it’s own free-speech-storm – not Gervais’ first. The two men aren’t the same, and they represent different approaches to their material; one being a more sincere craft, and the other being formulaic clickbait, but both somehow ending up in the same position as self-appointed white knights.

It’s at this point that I want to make a couple of things as clear as possible so that what I say is neither misunderstood or wilfully misrepresented. A refrain for the article:1) No one should ever be arrested for mere words unless they explicitly incite violence against specific people or groups.
2) You should be able to tell jokes about whatever you like, no matter how dark, but part of freedom of speech is receiving any criticism that accompanies it.
3) Criticism is not censorship.

That said, on first to Ricky Gervais, who has a track record of writing funny, considered comedy shows with heart – his seminal sitcom The Office remaining a masterpiece on all those fronts. He is indeed a controversial figure though and despite protestations, this is an image he cultivates and as his comedy has become less consistent following The Office, his ability to write with heart has also been hit and miss. The first real mis-step I remember from Gervais was in 2011 and the public telling off he received from Richard Herring for his flippant use of the word ‘mong’ which he then doubled down on by repeating the word along with mocking faces, asserting his right to say it and that there was nothing wrong with it. To be fair to him, he would later climb down and sincerely – I believe – apologise.

Gervais during one of his famous Golden Globes performances, notorious for the roasting of those in attendance. Credit: NME.com

Since then, especially as a result of his Golden Globes hosting routines, he has become associated even more with controversy, and Humanity has been no different. When reading about the show, it became clear that the main charge against him was of transphobia, but before jumping to conclusions I wanted to watch the whole show for myself because even a whole 15 minute, seemingly self-contained bit can have a different effect on the context of a whole show. So I watched Humanity and i’m sad to say, I believe the bit in question is definitely transphobic, even if it’s not intended to be. He talks about how carefully he considers the targets of his jokes, but if that’s the case, he either made an unbelievable miscalculation or considered trans people a target. The bit starts off well. He’s reflecting on an earlier controversy of his regarding a Caitlyn Jenner joke, explaining how the person, morally, was the target, and not the fact that she is trans, as well as explaining a clever joke which played against old-fashioned jokes about women drivers.

Unfortunately, his clear disdain for Jenner leads him in to a bizarre second half of the bit where he explains ‘deadnaming’ and then gleefully and repeatedly does it before describing the decision to become trans as quite flippant and as similar to him identifying as a chimp and insisting people treat him as a chimp. He seems disgusted that trans people ask simple, basic consideration of others, and in comparing it to him identifying as a chimp brings to mind the kind of nut who responds to gay marriage with the ‘humans will be able to marry animals next’ complaint. It’s not funny, it’s awkward, and it makes a marginalised group the undoubted target of the bit. He’s clearly obsessed somewhat over his controversial Jenner joke, and in an effort to defend himself, has made a joke in bad faith which has gone on to punch down to trans people.

The rest of the show gets better in the sense that it’s rarely particularly offensive after that save for some clumsy lines and is capped off with some insightful routines about rape jokes, animal cruelty, and a warmly funny story about his mother’s funeral. The rape joke bit is especially eye-opening as it makes his point about free speech in a much more coherent way, saying that there is a difference between finding rape as a concept funny, and finding certain jokes which include rape funny. He gives a good example of a funny, totally harmless joke which plays with the word ‘rape’ while making it sincerely clear that a joke that trivialised rape as an experience or it’s victims would be out of order. The trans bit is the only really deplorable part of the show, and though there are a handful of funny bits, what it is overall, is mediocre. He is bogged down in his ‘shocking’ style, including a couple of lazy clangers about cancer where he seems to expect a laugh simply for making a dark cancer joke. He is hogtied by the theme of his show, and his overarching career theme of awkward offensiveness and often forgets to be particularly funny while performing his lecture about free speech.

He says as a quick aside towards the end of the show that it’s ‘never the point’ to offend people, but I beg to differ. The idea that he isn’t trying to offend people while telling so many jokes he knows are offensive doesn’t pass the smell test, and that’s a shame, because generally speaking, I think Gervais is sincere in trying to have a positive message in his comedy – he just has some blind spots, obscured by his interpretation of free speech. He says, quite rightly, that finding humour in even the worst of situations is important as it helps us through pain and through adversity, but I would then ask him how laughing at trans people helps with adversity?

How Gervais portrays himself as a literal martyr for Free Speech. A bit over-dramatic? Credit: New Humanist

I recently joked with friends that the modern ‘white man’s burden’ is constantly having to talk and be heard, and it apparent that Gervais feels his need to assert his unalienable right to do that is more important that the upset doing so may cause. That’s fine, and I defend his right to do it, but it points to the privilege he and some of the other people I will mention benefit from. He simply doesn’t know what it’s like to be joked about due to his race, religion, sexuality, disability, or gender, and maybe that’s why it’s so easy for him to make and defend jokes about trans people.

For Gervais, his controversy/free speech double-team has become a cottage industry. After his first Golden Globes performance where he ‘roasted the elite’, he was later invited back, and like Daniel Kaluuya at the end of Fifteen Million Merits, dutifully played the role of the provocateur. It’s not quite as edgy when your targets invite you to roast them. His comedy has become more dependent on him acting, to paraphrase, as ‘police for free speech’ on outlets like Twitter, and due to the gravitas of that topic, his fairly pedestrian comedy can be propelled to the zeitgeist of some fairly prurient conversations. Humanity is an OK stand up show easily co-opted as a platform for Gervais’ imagined martyrdom.

But Ricky Gervais is not the only person who has settled in to that niche. Enter, unfortunately, Count Dankula. Dankula, real name Mark Meechan, was until recently, a very little known YouTuber known for, if anything, a back catalog of drearily unfunny videos that mixed the lazy tropes of social media sketches and the ‘lulz’ of the Daily Stormer playbook. Bland sketches and memes. One of his latest unfunny sketches, depicting him training his dog to make ‘Nazi salutes’ at jokey commands such as “gas the Jews” and “Seig Heil” has ‘gone viral’, however, due to his being convicted of a crime for making it and may face jail time. It is no surprise that several people, and especially comedians, have raced to defend Meechan from this injustice, because that’s what it is. Getting back to the refrain from earlier, no matter how distasteful someone’s speech may be – and I think Meechan’s is more hateful than he has let on (more on that in a moment) – he didn’t explicitly incite violence against anyone, and so he should be able to say it.

As a Scot, I am as angry at the Scottish court who convicted Meechan as I am at anyone involved here. Not only is it embarrassing for my country to be the home of such an action, but it is also a phenomenally stupid move that has made this no-talent idiot a voice, but it has, in making him a victim of censorship, allowed him a martyr complex he is riding towards an undeserved relevance. Meechan has my support in terms of absolutely not facing conviction or censorship, but that’s where my support for him ends, and the reason for that comes from a look at the rest of his material and the company he keeps.

Though he denies having specific political beliefs, if you scratch the thinnest of surfaces on Meechan, it’s clear that he’s an alt-right personality. As mentioned earlier, his ‘comic’ choices, references, and explicit opinions are generally alt-right, right from the Daily Stormer style guide. Pepe the from is a prominent reference for him, using ‘autistic’ as an insult, using ‘globalist’ as a dog-whistle, memes, and flippant homophobia and Islamaphobia. He is deeply unpleasant, and uses ‘I was joking’ as a fallback, That’s fine of course, ultimately, but it is definitely dangerous. If the era of ‘Fake News’ is anything, it is one of manufactured confusion. The likes of Breitbart and the Daily Stormer may be evil, but they have their finger on the pulse of how people disseminate information online, and they know that even saying things like this as a joke has the desired effect. Here’s a quote from the oft-mentioned style guide:

“The tone should be light.

Most people are not comfortable with material that comes across as vitriolic, raging, non-ironic hatred.

The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not…

This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas kikes.”

Apologies for quoting that word at the end there, but their hateful vitriol needs to be seen I think.

Meechan surrounded by the symbols of the alt-right. This is prevalent in his online presence. Credit: iNews.co.uk

Consider this, and then consider that the more prominent figures he has since been cosiest to have been former EDL leader Tommy Robinson, Paul Joseph Watson, and Alex Jones. All different levels of insane and stupid, but all right wing bigots. Don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t mean anyone who defends Meechan should be tarred with the same brush, but it should give the likes of Ricky Gervais, David Baddiel, Stephen Fry and more pause when it comes to the nature of their support. Meechan has been closest to Robinson and Watson, meeting them in person and appearing with them with not even a veiled enjoyment of them and their support. I therefore think it’s credible to think that he shares their bigoted beliefs on a number of topics, and given he is unquestionably reading from the alt-right play book of lulz, he isn’t necessarily doing so ‘just as a joke’. The more of this material the indoctrinated see, the more emboldened they are, and while his joke, in a vacuum, is in bad taste but ultimately innocent, in that ‘lulz’ context, it is more serious. Indeed, after the pug video being published originally, the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities received messages of abuse which made some members feel unsafe.

The difference between Meechan and Gervais is that I believe Gervais is sincere in what he says even if I think he gets it wrong at times, while I believe strongly that Meechan is riding the ‘free speech’ wagon to relevance and prominence. He is nailing himself to a cross over the injustice done to him, but that wasn’t the case when he was promoting petitions to criminalise Antifa groups due to their beliefs. In short, he doesn’t give a shit about free speech, he gives a shit about his ability to make racist memes and videos. It’s unfortunate that this is something we should all support, and that good people will fight for it when he wouldn’t do the same for you. I don’t know how familiar Gervais and the other comedians who have defended him are aware of the alt-right playbook, but this isn’t anyone who should be being held up as a protector of anything. He is a statistic, and a serious one, but when that is taken as endorsement, it is a problem.

While David Baddiel and others have later voiced some pause regarding the kind of guy Count Dankula is and his kind of material, Gervais has yet – I believe – to do so and has followed up his original comments with a tweeted picture of his cat with its paw up joking that it had watched the pug video. Maybe he’s just moved on since then, which is fair enough, but again clumsy. Gervais is possibly the most famous comedian in the world and like many celebrities, has a very loyal and organised fanbase. His popularising and typical doubling down on Meechan goes beyond defending this guy’s right to freedom and more towards endorsing him and the bad gag generally. This association is something the likes of Dankula and the rest of the alt-right are likely to bolster as it furthers their ultimate goal of making their hateful speech socially acceptable.

At this point, I would like to go back to my refrain:

1) No one should ever be arrested for mere words unless they explicitly incite violence against specific people or groups.
2) You should be able to tell jokes about whatever you like, no matter how dark, but part of freedom of speech is receiving any criticism that accompanies it.
3) Criticism is not censorship.

Doug Stanhope is an excellent example of a comedian with edgy, controversial material who doesn’t care if he offends you but generally does it in good faith. Credit: Ticketfly

Despite my criticism of the comedians here, that is all it is. Make your jokes, and unless someone is genuinely censored from doing so, who cares? If it’s funny, great; if it’s not, i’ll probably not watch again. That’s how it works. The shame here is that this baseline isn’t holding true due to the niche of comedians being offensive at the altar of free speech. Probably my favourite stand up is Doug Stanhope (I doubt he’d like this article but still) because as dark or offensive as he can be, it’s never in bad faith, he’s never punching down at people. He just writes what he thinks is funny, and while it’s not always to my taste, I know he’s not doing any of it maliciously and he doesn’t really care if he gets criticism for it.

In the case of Ricky Gervais, Count Dankula, and others, I think they protest too much. They pretend to be aloof while going on to make jokes or entire routines about those critical of them, and that makes for fairly dull material more than anything else.

That got me thinking, and while I don’t want to over-generalise, I think it’s clear that the vast majority of those who wax concerned about free speech are those least vulnerable to hateful speech: straight white men. To straight white men, the worst thing you can really say to them is that they’re wrong – we’re almost invulnerable to prejudice and can never truly understand it. That’s what privilege is. Perhaps if we knew they fear and de-humanisation of hate-speech we would be a bit less eager to ‘push the envelope’ just because we can. Personally, I would argue that if something is funny, it is worthwhile and it’s as simple as that, but that things aren’t really funny if they mock marginalised people or their experiences. People get it wrong at times, but don’t be scared to apologise if you do, it’s part of a healthy society to discuss these things. As ever, as long as you’re sincere, no one can ask more.

Freedom of speech is incredibly important, and should be fought for, but in defending it, we need to be careful not to embrace and put on a pedestal that sometimes hides behind it. I would rather admire the likes of Ricky Gervais for great material rather than mediocre material which seems more meaningful because it’s tacked-on to a debate about free speech. I certainly don’t want to even think about ‘Count Dankula’ at all again after I’ve finished this article. See him and defend him for what he is, a horrible person who has suffered an injustice, and not for this imagined view of him as a white knight of liberty. He’s not even funny.

South Korea hosted the 2018 incarnation of the games. Credit: The Week UK

This article is a direct companion piece to the stupidly titled How I Would Ruin the Olympics for a Lot of People and has a similarly stupid title because they should match I guess. That article was a fairly nerdy deep-dive in to the ‘spirit of Olympic competition’ and what events I think should and shouldn’t be represented there. This article isn’t about ‘the spirit of Olympic competition’ for two reasons: 1) because I’ve learned that exploitation is the major ‘spirit’ of Olympic competition (but I’ll let the likes of Dave Zirin and Jules Boykoff explain that better), and 2) because, crucially, I have never seen the Winter Olympics in the same light as the Summer games. While I see as the Summer games as a competition of remarkable physical competition steeped in ancient history, the Winter Olympics don’t have that same heritage based on sheer physical prowess and indeed, are less than 100 years old.

I’ve always had a very soft spot for the Winter Olympics. It shares the trait with the Summer Games of featuring sports very few people at all consider in the 4 years before games, but aesthetically, it is so much more unusually striking and beautiful. Every event is competed in an arena of glistening white, and instead of in a stadium, they are usually on stunning hillside settings. Maybe it’s my aesthetic enjoyment of these games that mean that I think the types of artistic disciplines I would eliminate from the Summer Games suit the Winter counterpart; events like figure skating which is so uniquely beautiful and awe-inspiring it barely even seems feasible or, less majestic but similarly impressive, other judging-based events like the ski and snowboard half-pipe. I can’t stress enough how fondly I regard the Winter Games when they are on, until they’re over and I forget about them like everyone else.

Mixed Doubles curling emerged as an exciting new version of the sport where two people play more intimately and with extra intensity. Yes i’m talking about curling. Credit: Team Canada’s Official Olympic website

I have always loved curling, partly because of it’s inherent connection to Scotland, and partly because it’s a puzzle game which is both relaxing to watch but requires excellent technique. I’ve also always found the sliding sports wonderful. All of the sliding events require such incredible bravery, I can never even imagine what they must be like to do, especially Skeleton, which involved going down the track head first but also the slightly goofier bobsleigh which is no less dangerous. I also have an almost grudging like of ski and snowboard cross because, while they are based on activities I find kinda bourgeois, the quick, tight racing is competitive and exciting in a way most racing actually isn’t. Finally, mogul, while also based on skiing is the only sport which effectively and interestingly mixes racing and judged tricks. It’s so fast, mesmerising and impressive that it’s always something I look forward to at the Winter games.

This year though, I didn’t quite enjoy them as much as I had previously though, and that’s why we’re here. Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed watching some of the events, like the ones I have just listed, but I was able to put my finger on some reasons why it didn’t resonate with me as much this time, and it’s not just because they aired live in Britain between midnight and mid-day when I was at work.

Part of the problem was with some of the sports I’ve listed above as my favourites. Curling suffered from almost upstaging itself. The new ‘Mixed Doubles’ curling event was great – no less tactical but very exciting and made more sense. I only realised this after the Mixed Doubles was decided and they moved to the traditional 4-person men and women’s events and I realised that, while I still enjoyed the game, some of it’s slow pace and counter-intuitive rules made it seem a bit dreary in comparison. The primary problem is the relationship between scoring possession of ‘the hammer’ (the crucial last stone of each end). In the mixed doubles, like a serve in tennis, the teams exchange the Hammer alternately, regardless of the end result (pun intended). It’s an advantage which is necessary to the sport but shared equally for fairness and adding an interesting tension to the game, i.e. an advantage where there is pressure to press your advantage. This isn’t missing in the traditional game, but it is much weaker because the Hammer only switch sides when the team wielding it scores. Not only does that mean that often one team has the Hammer more than the other, but it often incentives ‘blank ends’. These often occur if an end isn’t forming the way the team with the hammer likes, and so they play to blank the end so they can keep the Hammer rather than risking only scoring one point and losing the Hammer. There are genuine tactics behind this, but a shamefully high number of ends are played through mechanically with each team knocking the others out of the ‘house’ until they run out of stones. This can take a while and has absolutely no tension to it. I still enjoyed watching it as I enjoy the sport, but the amount of time I spent watching meaningless playing of it became a disappointment.

Skeleton requires a lot of heart to do and is very cool to watch, just maybe not four separate times. Credit: Team Canada’s Official Olympic website

There were other sports I enjoy which didn’t quite land as much because of how the competition (as opposed to the sport itself) was designed. This included all of the sliding events, the winners of which were determined by cumulative times over four runs. I understand the strength of this, it measures consistency, but it doesn’t necessarily reward the fastest run. That, to me, is the most important measurement in the sports but, in some circumstances, someone could own the fastest run but still not win. Even worse, because the event is realised over four runs, by the time we get to the fourth run, it’s often a procession where the contenders only need clean, steady runs to win because the gap is small. This isn’t always the case, but it happened with a couple of the events and made for a pretty dull conclusion with more tension at the start, rather than the end of the competition.

Speed skating is another sport which I had an affinity for that the design of the competition kinda spoiled. I understand that this ‘long track’ version of the sport is more of a time trial than the short-track version, but the look of it gives off, shall we say, mixed messages. Two skaters would skate at the same time, pair after pair until the field had all raced with the fastest time winning. The problem was though, that while everyone was just plugging in their time, they were sharing the track with someone else. This looks like a race, but as the commentators couldn’t stop pointing out, the two competitors weren’t directly racing. It looked like a race, but it wasn’t, which meant that the competitive promise that came from how it looked, was lessened by the lack of racing which only served to dampen the tension of the event. It was stuck between two things: a race and a time trial but was kind of neither totally either (it really is a time trial, but you still need to be faster than the other person overall of course). Seen as the event isn’t really a race, I think it would have worked better with a smaller field and each racer going one at a time and taking turns, one by one, to get their time in. I think that would increase the tension and the focus of each person taking on the entire field and the clock.

Even worse and, frankly, absurd was the phenomenon of the Netherlands short-track team breaking the world record but only getting a bronze because they were in the ‘B-Final’. Short-track is generally the more instinctive version of the sport, but this event is a real thing of nonsense. It happened because there was such a small field of teams and the teams that didn’t advance to the final for some reason were put in Final B, essentially a meaningless, ‘Best of the Rest’ race but because only 4 teams were racing in the medal-deciding ‘Final A’ and two were disqualified, they gave the bronze to the winner of Final B, who happened to set a new world record. It seems less ridiculous in that description, but it is still terribly counter-intuitive. Either Final B should count or it shouldn’t be raced, and so either the Netherlands should either have won Gold, or be knocked out in the semi finals. For the record, I think it should have been the latter. If you have semi-finals to qualify for the final, it should be a straight knockout or there’s no point in it at all; and so even though the Dutch were clearly capable of more, they didn’t show it in the semi finals and wouldn’t be skating again. Final A should just be the final and 1st and 2nd should have got Gold and Silver respectively and no one gets a Bronze.

Biathlon. If they were really talented, they would shoot with the gun on their backs while they’re skiing. Credit: Berliner-zeitung.de

Then there are the weird events, and not in an endearing way, in a puzzling or disappointing way. I’m thinking first of Biathlon, the combination the impressive but dull cross-country skiing and, for some reason, shooting. I have no idea why this happens, and I don’t see the connection between the disciplines unless you’re trying to find the most technically gifted (and therefore worst) potential Bond Villain – guys that maybe would have killed Roger Moore in The Spy Who Loved Me. Usually, weird combinations like this can be surreal and fun, but unfortunately not in this instance. Weird in a disappointing way were two versions of the Ski Jumping. The main version of ski jumping would be a great sport if it was just about measuring sheer distance, which , given the look of the event, it should be, but for some reason, they add in a judges portion for the style of flight and landing like that either significantly differs between jumpers, or even matters. It adds an x-factor to the most intuitive part of the sport and makes it a bit less impactful, though I still like it overall. I was very disappointed, however, by the Nordic Combined. I heard that it was a combination of ski jumping and then skiing and I was very down for it, imagining people jumping, landing, and then going straight in to a race. Instead, they did both sings separately, at different times of the day. Instead of being this cool, intense hybrid, it was drained of it by methodically separating them. I’m sure this design makes sense but even if it doesn, it doesn’t mean it’s interesting.

Finally, I want to talk about the trick-based judged snowboarding. As I said earlier, I enjoy snowboard cross, and I would like to add to that that you need to be very brave and talented to perform these tricks, but overall, I found the whole presentation fairly painful. To be totally unfair to the sport, I’m not used to watching it and it was rare that I really noticed significant differences between the tricks and could discern differences in difficulty and technique, so i’d be watching and someone would do something that looked great but would get a mediocre score, and then the next person would do something similar and the commentators would lose their minds. Maybe the sport is just fairly narrow in terms of what can be achieved, but for this reason, it somehow became a bit boring to watch even incredible stunts. The worst thing about the sport though is how ridiculously uncool the whole thing somehow is, from the big personalities, who all kinda seem like entitled douchebags (i’m sure they’re not, but they seem that way. Shaun White obviously is), to the try-hard, painfully hip commentators who can’t stop saying things like ‘gnarly’ and making lame jokes because I guess that’s the scene. It’s like Tim Westwood is commentating. This of course is a very personal and definitely unfair criticism but it’s one I had to get off my chest.

The Netherlands won all their Golds in speed skating. They really like speed skating there for some reason. Credit: SB Nation

Finally, and more seriously, while I have no interest in disqualifying events from the games like I would for the Summer Olympics, the Winter games do suffer from the same problem of medal weighting, doling out dozens of medals for some disciplines, and relatively few for others. There are 12 cross country skiing medals to be won, but only 4 for the luge, 22 for speed skating and just 5 for figure skating. Especially at the Winter Olympics, which has a limited selection of sports comparitively, this means that if a country specialises in a sport with a lot of medals, they can be over-represented on the medal table, for as much as that matters. Over half of Norway’s Gold tally came from cross-country skiing alone, and two more came from other skiing disciplines. Norway are excellent at skiing apparently and because there are lots of medals in that, they won the Winter Olympics. Every single one of the Netherland’s Golds came from speed skating, and because of that, they came 5th. Not only is this bad for the weigting of the medal table, but it makes for fairly repetitive action at times with events that are only marginally different from each other and allow for teams to pad their medal haul. I would like to see sports like skiing and speed skating have some of the events discontinued and try to diversify the events overall. I’m not claiming to be especially creative or a genius, but winter sports feel like a ripe setting to invent events for. However, for the fun of it, let me try:

Now this admittedly sounds absurd, but i’m not sure it is. Have it as a big race all at once and racers have to essentially change footwear at each stage. They are very different disciplines, but I can imagine there are athletes who can become proficient enough at all three to race. Athletes have to snowboard a longer slalom course all at once; they them change footwear in to skis and race for 5km (a thankfully shorter distance) and ski to/inside the speed skating arena almost like marathon runners entering the stadium; and then they speed skate for 1500m. Add that to the Winter Olympics.

Overall, I wouldn’t change much about the Winter Olympics, I don’t want to ruin it for anyone, but I do think there are ways to improve them, make them more diverse, and make them even more exciting by eliminating the more broken competitions. Regardless of the relative negativity here and the fact that i’ll soon forget about Pyeong Chang 2018, I still look forward to the next games. There’s something magical about the Winter Olympics, even if they’re also a bit lame.